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>iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. [...] That's not age speaking. They are just two

by jasode 6y ago

>iPhones are boring compared to 8- or 16-bit computers, if what you are interested in is how the thing works. [...] That's not age speaking. They are just two fundamentally different things. The iPhone was just one example. It doesn't matter whether the new thing is Android, or Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or latest FPGA from Xilinx/Altera. Even though all of those can do much more advanced things than the toy computers I used to play with, none of those spark me with the same excitement. I could pass it off as being too worldly-wise (i.e. disillusionment) to play with Raspberry Pi and Arduino -- or I can just admit that the best explanation for my apathy about new tech is that I'm simply older and lost interest. With a TI-99 toy computer, playing a primitive Space Invaders game and typing BASIC code like "10 PRINT "HELLO"; 20 GOTO 10" to giggle at the "HELLO" infinitely scrolling up the screen was fun. Today, I can type Javascript by pressing F12 in a web browser and it objectively has more power than TI-BASIC but it's not as fun. That contradiction of power-vs-fun just means I simply older. There are lots of folks out there genuinely having fun exploring what Javascript can do and it would be silly for me to claim that I previously had fun because TI-BASIC was "superior" to Javascript.

Baeocystin 6y ago
I don't think it's strange at all to claim a less-powerful system can be more fun that a more-powerful one. There's something to be said for systems that are simple enough that you can, with some effort, hold the whole machine in your head, so to speak. That was the feeling I got with my C=128. Anything much past that, and you have to resort to simplifications. Which is fine, but may be less satisfying, depending on what you were getting out of it in the first place. Getting really in to the edges of JavaScript on its own is a very different feeling than getting in to the edges of the system-as-a-whole, right? Barry Schwartz' The Paradox of Choice gets in to this to some degree, and is an interesting read.

by jasode 6y ago

Baeocystin 6y ago

I don't think it's strange at all to claim a less-powerful system can be more fun that a more-powerful one. There's something to be said for systems that are simple enough that you can, with some effort, hold the whole machine in your head, so to speak. That was the feeling I got with my C=128. Anything much past that, and you have to resort to simplifications. Which is fine, but may be less satisfying, depending on what you were getting out of it in the first place. Getting really in to the edges of JavaScript on its own is a very different feeling than getting in to the edges of the system-as-a-whole, right? Barry Schwartz' The Paradox of Choice gets in to this to some degree, and is an interesting read.